THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITYJEWISH STUDIES PROGRAMcordially invites you to a lecture by

Daniel Staetsky

(Institute for Jewish Policy Research)

Strictly Orthodox Jewish future

In his 2010 book, 'Shall the religious inherit the Earth?' political sociologist Eric Kaufmann argued that a religious 'take-over' of the world is taking place through demography: while the secular population does not tend to replace itself through fertility, religious groups across many populations display fertility levels sufficient for vigorous growth. Today, the strictly Orthodox Jewish population possesses the highest fertility of all religious groups in the West, leaving not only the national populations and the mainstream Jews far behind, but also the Muslim populations in the West and in the Middle East. This lecture will present a detailed comparative assessment of the process of demographic transformation of selected Jewish communities in Israel and the Diaspora - from largely secular and/or traditional to strongly religious. It will also place the discussion of Jewish de-secularisation in the broader framework of demographic transition focusing on the interplay between fertility, mortality and religious disaffiliation.

Tuesday, January 23 at 6 p.m.

Gellner Room, Monument Building

Dr Daniel Staetsky is a demographer and social statistician, specializing in demography of Jews, Israel and the Middle East. In the past Dr Staetsky coordinated work of the Division of Migration Statistics at the Central Bureau of Statistics, Israel. Today, he is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. He is especially interested in demographic 'puzzles' and is responsible for the most significant contributions to date on the topics of Jewish pattern of mortality, convergences and divergences of mortality regimes across the developed world, and the paradox of Israeli Arab fertility. He holds a PhD in social statistics from the University of Southampton, UK and an MA in demography from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.